my artful nest

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

I thought I would celebrate by posting some of the manatee art work from my collection. I am slightly obsessed with manatees and I have been since forever. So I can not help making manatee art whenever I need a theme and collecting it to make me happy.

These are just a few of my collection...

Texturally gessoed masonite board, mixed media manatees.

Manatee hand carved by a local folk artist and bought at a craft sale for a buck!

Ceramic manatee mug I made in high school.

"Manatee and the Sea" Acrylic on canvas by my bestie Larissa.

I drew this manatee using Tombow markers.Resourced from "How to Draw Baby Animals" by Top That! Publishing.

These are just a few of my manatee masterpieces. Someday soon, I will post about middle school manatee art lessons and a few other masterpieces floating around here!

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

I have been playing with canvases lately. Here are a few of my creations. Above is an 8 by 8 inch canvas with leaf stencil layers, and corrugated house shape over a piece of old quilt on top of a piece of cross stitch cloth. This was inspired by a recent trip to my friend Ruth's lake house, and given to her as a house warming gift

The three canvases above were created using a gelli plate. I knew I would put these in my mermaid/manatee themed bathroom (yes, it is true!) so I used colors that reminded me of the sea. They are 10 by 10 inch canvases and hung as a triptych, as shown here. I love the layers created with the stencils and printing. I also applied a thick medium through a word stencil to add a bit of a story element to the series. It reads "come together in beauty, release and surrender, yesterday, today, and tomorrow."

This is a series I created inspired by a class by Donna Downey. The challenge was to create ten 10 by 10 canvases in ten days. I decided to complete five 12 by 12 canvases in 5 days. I mostly used Tim Holtz distressing ink pads and sprays to apply the colors. I also used a house theme for my added ephemera.

Friday, March 20, 2015

This semester, I was again inspired by Gru and his minions to create a bulletin board using student minion drawings. This board reminds students of art class expectations (according to Gru, of course, from the movie Despicable Me)...You can see another minion inspired board here.

Another 8th grade collaboratively enlarged painting. I decided to stay with Keith Haring this year, as last year's turned out so well. I love how happily graphic these turn out...You can see more enlarged collaborations here, here, here, and here.

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Here is a new drawing assignment for 7th grade. I was inspired by a student who said that Halloween was the celebration of candy. I thought, "Yeah, that sounds about right!" as visions of pop art candy closeups danced in my head!

Students took several closeup photos of various candies in wrappers using the square mode of their camera on their iPads. They then used the crop feature in their gallery to further enhance their composition, angling the candy and zooming in even more.

Students enlarged their image to a 12 by 12 black paper.

Using colored pencils, students recreated the candie's signature look, especially trying to copy the fonts of the label correctly.

In addition to working with colored pencil pressure to create color value variations, we also layered white colored pencil on top of or under the colors to get the look of the plastic wrapper with highlights. Students then created an interesting background effect to complete their composition.It was great to see how lifelike these turned out to be!!!